The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  The news of his predicament seemed to spread in concentric circles from the local newspaper articles and radio station coverage on to bigger news organizations in Louisville and Cincinnati, and from there on to every major news outlet in the country. By the time the farflung nation heard the news, three days had passed, and Floyd Collins was still trapped in that channel of rock, with his foot wedged under a boulder. Would-be rescuers would crawl down the narrow passage, calling out to him, and the trapped man would answer readily enough. He was chipper at first, confident that with so many people involved in the rescue attempt, his deliverance was only hours away.

  But it wasn’t.

  While he huddled in the sodden darkness, chilled and wet and hungry, rival teams of self-appointed rescuers stood in the field aboveground at the cave entrance, bickering over how best to save him. Everybody agreed that trying to enlarge the passageway in which Floyd Collins was trapped might trigger a cave-in and kill him. The rockfall that had trapped his leg proved how unstable the surrounding sandstone was. The rescuers proposed two alternate plans: either to amputate his leg, so that he could be dragged out of the cave without the need of excavation, or to dig a vertical shaft a few feet away from his location, and tunnel from there over to him and remove the rock. Collins was willing to sacrifice his leg to gain his freedom, but some of the rescuers argued that the man would surely bleed to death before he could be brought to the surface.

  Either plan might have worked, if only they had tried them quickly instead of standing in the barren field outside the hole arguing about it. The cold, wet January days passed slowly, and, deep in the sandstone cave, Floyd Collins, stranded for days without food or water, began to pray.

  The national reporters arrived in the first few days of the crisis, telegraphing stories back to their respective papers or broadcasting news bulletins from the soggy field. As the hours passed with no new developments in the case, they had to think up ways to keep the story fresh for the national audience. Some of them tried to find a grieving sweetheart that they could exhibit to mourn for the avid public, but nobody ever located one. Floyd Collins had been a solitary, unexceptional little man whose chief passion in life had been exploring the caves of his home county. His parents and friends were distressed, but they did not provide good theatre to captivate the listening masses. A beautiful and tearful girl would have fueled the story like wildfire, but there were no suitable candidates for the role.

  The reporters decided that there was nothing for it, but to try to interview the trapped man himself, but to do so was the stuff of nightmares.

  In order to converse with Floyd Collins a man had to crawl on his belly through the damp earth two hundred feet down a passageway that was only inches higher and wider than the man who entered it. There was no room to turn around. In order to leave, you would have to back out the way you came—two hundred feet—and there was always the possibility that further movement in the cave would dislodge more rock and trap the reporter, too.

  But it was the only way to get the interview.

  The only stipulation made by the rescue teams was that anyone who wanted to venture down the passage must take food and drink to the trapped man. This stipulation was only common decency, and all the reporters readily agreed to it.

  All this Carl knew already, but he listened to the tale with an expression of rapt interest. After a pause to refill his glass of whiskey, the raconteur came to the part of the story he hadn’t known.

  “One at a time, every couple of hours, a reporter would take a packet of sandwiches and a flask of water, and set off down the hole with everybody watching him go, calling out messages of encouragement for Floyd. Then ten or fifteen minutes would pass with everybody in the field standing there staring at the opening, hoping that there’d be no compounding the tragedy. Then, by and by, a somber, damp, and muddy big-city journalist would emerge, backing out of the hole empty-handed, and the whole crowd would surround him, clamoring for news of the prisoner.”

  “Vultures,” said one of the listeners. “Too craven to make the trip down there themselves. I hope the reporter who braved that hole made them credit him in their news stories, John.”

  John drained his glass. “You may think otherwise by and by, Bob,” he said. “The reporter who had just emerged from that hellhole would say something like, ‘Why, he’s in good spirits, considering. He thanks you all for your efforts, and says he’s confident that you will deliver him from this cavernous tomb.’

  “Then a few hours later another reporter would work up the nerve to make the descent, and, armed with another load of provisions, off he’d go, and then he’d come back with much the same tale as the others.

  “Now, what I’m about to tell you . . . the fellow I heard this from was a skinny young Kentucky journalist. He put me in mind of you, boy,” he said, nodding toward Carl.

  A portly balding man in shabby tweeds interrupted. “I hope you’re not fixing to insult our visitor, John. That wouldn’t be neighborly.”

  “Now you fellas know me better than that,” said the raconteur. “That young Kentucky journalist I was speaking of is the only one of that passel of newsmen that was worth a bucket of warm spit. Now let me tell the tale.”

  “Go on ahead then,” said the man in tweeds, waving his cigar in the air. “We’re all ears.”

  “All right, then. For the better part of a day, as I told you, those city reporters were crawling down that sandstone conduit to get their interviews with poor Floyd Collins, and finally the skinny youngster from the Kentucky paper reckoned he’d take a turn. So they loaded him down with a packet of sandwiches and a thermos, and the crowd escorted him to the hole, wishing him godspeed. He said he scooted down the passage in a cold sweat, taking a good many minutes that seemed like hours to make progress, and finally he reached the place where the passage widened a bit, and took a sharp turn to the right, where it got even narrower. At that point you were still a hundred feet short of reaching the trapped man, and you were a good long ways from safety. And what do you think that Kentucky reporter saw when he reached that turning place?”

  His listeners shook their heads. Despite the warmth of the wood-stove and the bourbon in his gullet, Carl felt a chill of dread. “Out with it, John,” someone called out. “What did the boy find down there?”

  “Packets of sandwiches.” The old man’s lip curled in disgust. “A whole pile of food stacked there at the junction of passageways. Cartons of coffee. Apples. About two days’ worth of provisions. Everything that those big-city journalists had taken down to give to Floyd Collins had been discarded right there. When the going got rough, when they had been gone long enough and got far enough from the entrance, those gutless wonders dropped the food in the passageway thirty yards from Collins himself, and they hightailed it right back out of the cave.” He shrugged. “I can’t say I blame them for that. My backbone turns to ice just thinking about having to squeeze into a cold, damp hole in the ground and crawl for a hundred yards or more into that narrowing dark. Maybe getting trapped there myself.”

  The listeners nodded in agreement. “A hell of a thing,” one of them remarked. “But they lied about it.”

  “It’s a shameful business,” another one said. “How those journalists could hold their heads up, I’ll never know.”

  John nodded. “That’s it, boys. Every one of those reporters came back out of that cave claiming he’d had a chat with the trapped man. Full of stories about what poor Floyd had said to them, and what he’d eaten. And every word of it a lie.”

  “They printed those lies in their papers, too, didn’t they?”

  The storyteller drummed his fist on his knee. “They left that man to freeze and starve while his friends and neighbors on the surface thought that he was being looked after. They sold his chance of survival for a few false words in a newspaper that would line a birdcage the day after it was printed.”

  The group fell silent then, and in the dim light Carl felt their accusing stare
s. He hung his head. “Yes, sir, I reckon they gave the profession a bad name. But I never would. I would have tried to get that interview, fair enough, but I wouldn’t have lied about it. I’d have crawled as far as I had to in order to look that man in the face. And I would have taken his food to him, or I’d never have been able to touch another bite myself in this world.”

  One of the old men laughed. “Are you as young as that, boy?”

  John’s anger had subsided into weary resignation. “Life has a way of taking all those fine sentiments and making them seem outmoded, compared to the more practical virtues like feeding your family, getting praise from your colleagues, keeping your job. Wait until you have a hard choice to make before you start polishing your halo.”

  “I haven’t seen anything worth trading my honor for yet, sirs.” Carl drew his notebook out of the pocket of his overcoat. “Now, as long as I’m here, I was hoping you might help me with a little information about this murder trial up in Wise, if you can see your way clear to do that—as honorable men.”

  The man in the next chair reached for his tobacco pouch and began to construct another cigarette. “Brutus was an honorable man.”

  “Oh, come off it, Jim,” said the one called Bob. “This boy’s from over in Johnson City. Green he may be, but he’s bound to be better than those boiled owls from the big city. I say we give him a leg up. Wouldn’t you hate to see the fancy scribes leave him in the dust on this story?”

  The denizens of the pink tearoom exchanged looks while Carl waited, conscious that he was holding his breath. Finally, the grizzled man in the brown suit said, “Did you bring a pen to go with that notebook, son? Because we’re only going over this once.”

  “And don’t pester us with questions,” said John. “If we know it, and if it matters, we’ll tell it to you without prompting. You’ve read the newspaper accounts thus far, of course?”

  Carl nodded, wisely choosing not to interrupt, even to answer a question.

  “Right, well, I grew up in the Pound,” said a wiry little man in gray tweed. “So I’ll start you off. Ever been there? No? Well, it’s a wide place in the road just over the mountain from Kentucky.”

  Another of the armchair sages spoke up. “Pretty country. You’ll know about the Breaks, I’ll warrant?”

  Carl nodded. Travel writing was not his field, but of course, he knew about the local wonders. Just over the Tennessee line in Kentucky they had a waterfall whose spray made a rainbow by moonlight: only two or three “moonbows” in the whole world, and he lived fifty miles from one. And Roan Mountain, which was even closer to home. On Roan Mountain you could see your own shadow in the clouds below you. Roan Mountain had bare patches called “Balds” where trees wouldn’t grow and nobody knew why. The locals’ explanation was that the devil got drunk up there on the mountain, and left his staggered footprints, which were poisonous to plants. He knew that southwest Virginia’s claim to a geographic wonder was the Breaks. He had read about it, but he had never been there.

  The Grand Canyon of the South was a deep gorge straddling the state line between Virginia and Kentucky, covering thousands of acres of wilderness with soaring cliffs, forested mountains, and here and there a scattering of caves. Over millions of years the Russell Fork of the Big Sandy River had cut the five-mile gorge, wearing away the soft sandstone of Pine Mountain, and sculpting majestic vistas among the green Appalachian hills. The Virginia side of the Breaks, as the gorge was called, was located in Dickenson County, just north of Wise, perhaps twenty miles from the Mortons’ hometown of Pound. It was a popular spot for hikers, painters, and sightseers. But to someone with little money, a trial to cover, and only the train for transport, the Breaks was surely as inaccessible as the moon.

  He wished he had time to see it, though.

  What a stunning setting the Breaks would have made for the filming of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine: breathtaking scenery, plus the advantage of being the geographically correct place to set the story. But Carl had read somewhere that the Paramount moviemakers had chosen instead to film at Big Bear Lake in California, and in the San Bernardino National Forest. He didn’t suppose that those western landscapes would look much like the Virginia Blue Ridge, but most cinema audiences wouldn’t know the difference. Maybe they wouldn’t even care. For the first time ever, the filmmakers were shooting the movie outdoors in full color, so for audiences the novelty of colorful scenery would overshadow all other considerations. The movie people had other problems to contend with besides the technology of color photography: mountain accents, an exotic setting, and a rural Southern culture. But the movie would be important for southwest Virginia. It would focus the eyes of the nation on their corner of the world. It might even bring in some tourists, expecting Wise County to look like the California movie set. Carl wondered if Hollywood would get anything right. The film would be in theatres in about in six months’ time. He supposed he’d find out then.

  “Coal mine country,” said the man in the bow tie. “The girl’s father was a miner. I expect you knew that.”

  “They say he was bad to drink,” said the man with the briar pipe. “My sister married into a family up there in Wise.”

  Bow Tie nodded. “I’ve heard that, too. People liked him, though. The whole county turned up for the funeral. If you’ve got a picture in your mind of a poor peasant family stuck in the back of beyond, you’d best get rid of it right now.”

  John nodded. “You have to take the mother’s family into account. They always thought she married beneath her. Her people owned land. Her uncle was a sheriff, and the commonwealth attorney is a cousin, if I remember correctly. The Pound may be a little pond, but they were big frogs within its confines. Well, the girl went to college. That says it all, doesn’t it?”

  Carl hesitated. “Well, I suppose it means they are not a typical rural family. Not many people from little mountain hamlets go to college. Or at least it suggests that Miss Erma Morton is not a typical mountain girl. I think I read that she paid her own way to East Radford Teachers College.”

  “That’s right. Borrowed money from a maiden aunt. Now I wonder why she set such a store on college.”

  “Well, I can speak for myself, coming from a similar background,” said Carl. “I did it for a chance to see the world. It was a way out of that little town I came from.”

  “Well, that makes sense—for you, I reckon. But we were talking about Erma Morton. She went a hundred miles or so away to college, and then she turned right back around and went home to that speck of a community buried deep in the mountains. If she wanted to see the world, I don’t reckon it agreed with her. She got her book learning and she went home. What do you make of that?”

  “Couldn’t get a husband?” The grizzled fellow’s laugh turned into a wheezing cough, and he scrabbled in his coat pocket for a handkerchief.

  “But she’s beautiful,” said Carl, who found himself thinking out loud. “At least, if the press photographs can be believed.”

  One of the tearoom elders gave him a careless wave. “We concede the point.”

  “Well, then, surely Erma Morton could have acquired a husband if she had put her mind to it.”

  “Have you looked up East Radford Teachers College? The next town over is Blacksburg, home of an all-men’s college, Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Any halfway pretty girl that couldn’t land a catch in a stocked pond as big as that couldn’t have been trying.”

  Carl nodded. “Right. And if she went to college solely in order to get married, she shouldn’t have attended an all-female teacher’s college. Now, my alma mater, East Tennessee State, would have been closer to home for her, and it’s coeducational. I expect we could have found her a sweetheart.”

  “Seems strange, doesn’t it?” mused John. “If she hated her daddy bad enough to kill him, why would she move back home once she’d escaped from him by going away to school?”

  Carl had an answer for that one. He had not been long out of college himself. “You look at
things differently after you’ve been away from home, I think. At least, I did. Maybe when she lived at home, she thought her life was normal—or that the situation was inevitable, anyhow—but after a taste of independence, she found she couldn’t stand him anymore.”

  “You’re all talking like she did it,” said the man in tweeds. “Want another drink, son?”

  “No, thanks,” said Carl, waving away the proffered bottle. “And I don’t know if she did it or not. I came here hoping for an informed opinion.”

  John laughed. “Oh, between us we’ve got a raft of opinions, all right. Some more informed than others. My thinking was that if the county sheriff arrested a pretty young girl who led a blameless life, then he must have had an iron-clad reason for doing so. A girl like that wouldn’t be anybody’s first choice for the villain of the piece, so they must have some solid evidence against her—or nowhere else to turn.”

  “Especially since you made such a point of their family connections, John. That the Mortons are kin to local lawyers and such.”

  Carl had been thinking the same thing. “I guess I’ll hear the evidence for myself,” he said. “I’m attending the trial. I just wondered if you knew anything that might not come out in the public record.”

  “A trial is a chess game, young man,” drawled the silver-haired man in the corner.

  The elders laughed. “You ought to know, counselor!”

  “Well, I do know. Anybody who thinks he’ll attend a trial in order to learn the facts of the case is a graven fool. It is a chess game, I tell you. Each side presents only the facts and opinions that serve their case, and they slant those facts to strengthen their position. You know who ought to be the patron saint of judges? Pontius Pilate! When he said, ‘What is truth?’ he spoke for all of us.”

  “I just want to know if you think she’s guilty,” said Carl. “I know that as a reporter, I’m not supposed to have an opinion about that.”